Google and Bing are more than just search engines – they are the very definition of how to leverage big data. Since their inception, they have been using data to build products from search, advertising to Translate to Play Music. However, data alone is no longer the golden nugget to being a successful company, in fact it’s become a pain point for many. Being able to provide inference within context to data is the next big step in data management technology.

Google and Microsoft are now at the forefront of this giant leap forward in using data. . A great example of this is Google’s Knowledge Graph. Announced in May 2012, Google calls it the future of search, indexing concepts not just bits and bytes. The semantic network created by Google currently contains 570 million objects and over 18 billion facts about relationships between different objects that are used to understand the meaning of the keywords entered for the search. Facebook similarly recently introduced their “social graph” in order to make better sense of the relationships between people and provide more commonality for their users. And Microsoft similarly has “Satori” from technology developed out of its 2008 acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer

So what’s the secret behind Google, Microsoft and Facebook’s latest innovation investment? Semantic technology. The term semantic refers to of or relating to meaning in language. Semantic search technology allows people to grab information by concept instead of keyword.

Gartner identified semantic technology as a top technology trend impacting information infrastructure in 2013, “[Semantic technologies] have existed for years and are based on advanced statistics, data mining, machine learning and knowledge management. One reason they are garnering more interest is the renewed business requirement for monetizing information as a strategic asset. Even more pressing is the technical need. Increasing volumes, variety and velocity — big data — in IM and business operations, requires semantic technology that makes sense out of data for humans, or automates decisions.”

Google is pushing the adoption of semantic technology and is gradually replacing its Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) based on links. The search giant’s innovations are setting the pace for the future of search. Google Now leverages the Google Knowledge Graph very effectively to provide users with specific answers to their search questions. It is rapidly closing in on their vision of the “Star Trek” computer, which could answer your questions in real time.

While semantic technologies have become increasingly popular, they have actually been in development for over a decade and have a set of standards that have been created by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). The W3C, chaired by Tim Berners-Lee (who is credited with inventing the hyperlink and the Internet as we know it today), is an international community composed of major technology companies that develop protocols and guidelines for the next generation of the Internet and computing.

Google Now is everything that Siri was purported to have been, and closer to the intention of the DARPA Personalized Assistant that Learn (PAL) program from which Siri arose. Apple is now stepping up its efforts in this arena, announcing at the recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference that Siri now has new male and female voices, Twitter search integration, Wikipedia integration and Bing Web search within the app. Where Google goes, others follow.

The graph model allows the formation of concepts through connections and interestingly enough, “knowledge graph” is not a trademarked phrase. Microsoft Bing has its “Snapshots,” now enhanced with Satori expansion, Facebook has its version of an entity graph, and Yahoo! has the “Yahoo! Knowledge Graph.” The phrase “knowledge graph” is rapidly becoming common vernacular.

The prediction that search would become increasingly semantic and graph-based has certainly proven to be more than true. Not only have the search engines since adopted schema.org as a standard, but things are now elevated to the next level in this process of adoption. Semantic technology is boundless and is the key to the future of search in both search and social engines. Thanks to companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google seeing semantic technology as an innovation investment, data will soon have the face of context that it so desperately needs.